CHARLES DICKENS
CHARLES DICKENS
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
Author of Varied Types, Heretics, Etc.
NEW YORK
DODD MEAD & COMPANY
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
❦
_First Edition Published in September, 1906_
To
RHODA BASTABLE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE DICKENS PERIOD 1
CHAPTER II
THE BOYHOOD OF DICKENS 24
CHAPTER III
THE YOUTH OF DICKENS 43
CHAPTER IV
“THE PICKWICK PAPERS” 71
CHAPTER V
THE GREAT POPULARITY 100
CHAPTER VI
DICKENS AND AMERICA 127
CHAPTER VII
DICKENS AND CHRISTMAS 155
CHAPTER VIII
THE TIME OF TRANSITION 181
CHAPTER IX
LATER LIFE AND WORKS 211
CHAPTER X
THE GREAT DICKENS CHARACTERS 244
CHAPTER XI
ON THE ALLEGED OPTIMISM OF DICKENS 266
CHAPTER XII
A NOTE ON THE FUTURE OF DICKENS 291
CHAPTER I
THE DICKENS PERIOD
Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises
merely from this, that we confuse the word “indefinable” with the word
“vague.” If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as “indefinable” we
promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges.
But this is an error even in common-place logic. The thing that cannot
be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and
legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable is the
indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too
actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have
the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual
to be defined.
But there is a third class of primary terms. There are popular
expressions which every one uses and no one can explain; which the wise
man will accept and reverence, as he reverences desire or darkness
or any elemental thing. The prigs of the debating club will demand
that he should define his terms. And being a wise man he will flatly
refuse. This first inexplicable term is the most important term of all.
The word that has no definition is the word that has no substitute.
If a man falls back again and again on some such word as “vulgar” or
“manly” do not suppose that the word means nothing because he cannot
say what it means. If he could say what the word means he would say
what it means instead of saying the word. When the Game Chicken (that
fine thinker) kept on saying to Mr. Toots, “It’s mean. That’s what
it is--it’s mean,” he was using language in the wisest possible way.
For what else could he say? There is no word for mean except mean. A
man must be very mean himself before he comes to defining meanness.
Precisely because the word is indefinable, the word is indispensable.
In everyday talk, or in any of our journals, we may find the loose
but important phrase, “Why have we no great men to-day? Why have we
no great men like Thackeray, or Carlyle, or Dickens?” Do not let us
dismiss this expression, because it appears loose or arbitrary. “Great”
does mean something, and the test of its actuality is to be found by
noting how instinctively and decisively we do apply it to some men and
not to others; above all how instinctively and decisively we do apply
it to four or five men in the Victorian era, four or five men of whom
Dickens was not the least. The term is found to fit a definite thing.
Whatever the word “great” means, Dickens was what it means. Even the
fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous
critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to
think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a
good writer. He is treated as a classic; that is, as a king who may now
be deserted, but who cannot now be dethroned. The atmosphere of this
word clings to him; and the curious thing is that we cannot get it to
cling to any of the men of our own generation. “Great” is the first
adjective which the most supercilious modern critic would apply to
Dickens. And “great” is the last adjective that the most supercilious
modern critic would apply to himself. We dare not claim to be great
men, even when we claim to be superior to them.
Is there, then, any vital meaning in this idea of “greatness” or in
our laments over its absence in our own time? Some people say, indeed,
that this sense of mass is but a mirage of distance, and that men
always think dead men great and live men small. They seem to think that
the law of perspective in the mental world is the precise opposite
to the law of perspective in the physical world. They think that
figures grow larger as they walk away. But this theory cannot be made
to correspond with the facts. We do not lack great men in our own day
because we decline to look for them in our own day; on the contrary,
we are looking for them all day long. We are not, as a matter of fact,
mere examples of those who stone the prophets and leave it to their
posterity to build their sepulchres. If the world would only produce
our perfect prophet, solemn, searching, universal, nothing would give
us keener pleasure than to build his sepulchre. In our eagerness we
might even bury him alive. Nor is it true that the great men of the
Victorian era were not called great in their own time. By many they
were called great from the first. Charlotte Brontë held this heroic
language about Thackeray. Ruskin held it about Carlyle. A definite
school regarded Dickens as a great man from the first days of his fame:
Dickens certainly belonged to this school.
In reply to this question, “Why have we no great men to-day?” many
modern explanations are offered. Advertisement, cigarette-smoking, the
decay of religion, the decay of agriculture, too much humanitarianism,
too little humanitarianism, the fact that people are educated
insufficiently, the fact that they are educated at all, all these
are reasons given. If I give my own explanation, it is not for its
intrinsic value; it is because my answer to the question, “Why have
we no great men?” is a short way of stating the deepest and most
catastrophic difference between the age in which we live and the early
nineteenth century; the age under the shadow of the French Revolution,
the age in which Dickens was born.
The soundest of the Dickens critics, a man of genius, Mr. George
Gissing, opens his criticism by remarking that the world in which
Dickens grew up was a hard and cruel world. He notes its gross feeding,
its fierce sports, its fighting and foul humour, and all this he
summarizes in the words hard and cruel. It is curious how different are
the impressions of men. To me this old English world seems infinitely
less hard and cruel than the world described in Gissing’s own novels.
Coarse external customs are merely relative, and easily assimilated.
A man soon learnt to harden his hands and harden his head. Faced with
the world of Gissing, he can do little but harden his heart. But the
fundamental difference between the beginning of the nineteenth century
and the end of it is a difference simple but enormous. The first
period was full of evil things, but it was full of hope. The second
period, the _fin de siècle_, was even full (in some sense) of good
things. But it was occupied in asking what was the good of good things.
Joy itself became joyless; and the fighting of Cobbett was happier than
the feasting of Walter Pater. The men of Cobbett’s day were sturdy
enough to endure and inflict brutality; but they were also sturdy
enough to alter it. This “hard and cruel” age was, after all, the age
of reform. The gibbet stood up black above them; but it was black
against the dawn.
This dawn, against which the gibbet and all the old cruelties stood
out so black and clear, was the developing idea of liberalism, the
French Revolution. It was a clear and a happy philosophy. And only
against such philosophies do evils appear evident at all. The optimist
is a better reformer than the pessimist; and the man who believes life
to be excellent is the man who alters it most. It seems a paradox,
yet the reason of it is very plain. The pessimist can be enraged at
evil. But only the optimist can be surprised at it. From the reformer
is required a simplicity of surprise. He must have the faculty of a
violent and virgin astonishment. It is not enough that he should think
injustice distressing; he must think injustice _absurd_, an anomaly in
existence, a matter less for tears than for a shattering laughter. On
the other hand, the pessimists at the end of the century could hardly
curse even the blackest thing; for they could hardly see it against
its black and eternal background. Nothing was bad, because everything
was bad. Life in prison was infamous--like life anywhere else. The
fires of persecution were vile--like the stars. We perpetually find
this paradox of a contented discontent. Dr. Johnson takes too sad a
view of humanity, but he is also too satisfied a Conservative. Rousseau
takes too rosy a view of humanity, but he causes a revolution. Swift
is angry, but a Tory. Shelley is happy, and a rebel. Dickens, the
optimist, satirizes the Fleet, and the Fleet is gone. Gissing, the
pessimist, satirizes Suburbia, and Suburbia remains.
Mr. Gissing’s error, then, about the early Dickens period we may
put thus: in calling it hard and cruel he omits the wind of hope
and humanity that was blowing through it. It may have been full of
inhuman institutions, but it was full of humanitarian people. And this
humanitarianism was very much the better (in my view) because it was a
rough and even rowdy humanitarianism. It was free from all the faults
that cling to the name. It was, if you will, a coarse humanitarianism.
It was a shouting, fighting, drinking philanthropy--a noble thing. But,
in any case, this atmosphere was the atmosphere of the Revolution; and
its main idea was the idea of human equality. I am not concerned here
to defend the egalitarian idea against the solemn and babyish attacks
made upon it by the rich and learned of to-day. I am merely concerned
to state one of its practical consequences. One of the actual and
certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately
to produce very great men. I would say superior men, only that the hero
thinks of himself as great, but not as superior. This has been hidden
from us of late by a foolish worship of sinister and exceptional men,
men without comradeship, or any infectious virtue. This type of Cæsar
does exist. There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But
the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
The spirit of the early century produced great men, because it believed
that men were great. It made strong men by encouraging weak men.
Its education, its public habits, its rhetoric, were all addressed
towards encouraging the greatness in everybody. And by encouraging the
greatness in everybody, it naturally encouraged superlative greatness
in some. Superiority came out of the high rapture of equality. It is
precisely in this sort of passionate unconsciousness and bewildering
community of thought that men do become more than themselves. No man
by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature; but a man may add
many cubits to his stature by not taking thought. The best men of the
Revolution were simply common men at their best. This is why our age
can never understand Napoleon. Because he was something great and
triumphant, we suppose that he must have been something extraordinary,
something inhuman. Some say he was the Devil; some say he was the
Superhuman. Was he a very, very bad man? Was he a good man with some
greater moral code? We strive in vain to invent the mysteries behind
that immortal mask of brass. The modern world with all its subtleness
will never guess his strange secret; for his strange secret was that he
was very like other people.
And almost without exception all the great men have come out of this
atmosphere of equality. Great men may make despotisms; but democracies
make great men. The other main factory of heroes besides a revolution
is a religion. And a religion again, is a thing which, by its nature,
does not think of men as more or less valuable, but of men as all
intensely and painfully valuable, a democracy of eternal danger. For
religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only
value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King. This
fact has been quite insufficiently observed in the study of religious
heroes. Piety produces intellectual greatness precisely because
piety in itself is quite indifferent to intellectual greatness. The
strength of Cromwell was that he cared for religion. But the strength
of religion was that it did not care for Cromwell; did not care for
him, that is, any more than for anybody else. He and his footman were
equally welcomed to warm places in the hospitality of hell. It has
often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the
ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that
religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
Carlyle killed the heroes; there have been none since his time. He
killed the heroic (which he sincerely loved) by forcing upon each man
this question: “Am I strong or weak?” To which the answer from any
honest man whatever (yes, from Cæsar or Bismarck) would certainly
be “weak.” He asked for candidates for a definite aristocracy, for
men who should hold themselves consciously above their fellows. He
advertised for them, so to speak; he promised them glory; he promised
them omnipotence. They have not appeared yet. They never will. For the
real heroes of whom he wrote had appeared out of an ecstacy of the
ordinary. I have already instanced such a case as Cromwell. But there
is no need to go through all the great men of Carlyle. Carlyle himself
was as great as any of them; and if ever there was a typical child of
the French Revolution, it was he. He began with the wildest hopes from
the Reform Bill, and although he soured afterwards, he had been made
and moulded by those hopes. He was disappointed with Equality; but
Equality was not disappointed with him. Equality is justified of all
her children.
But we, in the post-Carlylean period, have become fastidious about
great men. Every man examines himself, every man examines his
neighbours, to see whether they or he quite come up to the exact line
of greatness. The answer is, naturally, “No.” And many a man calls
himself contentedly “a minor poet” who would then have been inspired
to be a major prophet. We are hard to please and of little faith. We
can hardly believe that there is such a thing as a great man. They
could hardly believe there was such a thing as a small one. But we are
always praying that our eyes may behold greatness, instead of praying
that our hearts may be filled with it. Thus, for instance, the Liberal
party (to which I belong) was, in its period of exile, always saying,
“O for a Gladstone!” and such things. We were always asking that it
might be strengthened from above, instead of ourselves strengthening it
from below, with our hope and our anger and our youth. Every man was
waiting for a leader. Every man ought to be waiting for a chance to
lead. If a god does come upon the earth, he will descend at the sight
of the brave. Our protestations and litanies are of no avail; our new
moons and our sabbaths are an abomination. The great man will come when
all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He
will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do
without him.
We are then able to answer in some manner the question, “Why have we no
great men?” We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking
for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never
be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are small. When Diogenes went
about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had
very little time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on
his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making
sure that one man at any rate shall not be great. Now, the error of
Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he
omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest
man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern;
but he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where
the Founder of Christianity found the honest man; He found him on a
gibbet and promised him Paradise. Just as Christianity looked for the
honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside
the fool. It encouraged the fool to be wise. We can call this thing
sometimes optimism, sometimes equality; the nearest name for it is
encouragement. It had its exaggerations--failure to understand original
sin, notions that education would make all men good, the childlike yet
pedantic philosophies of human perfectibility. But the whole was full
of a faith in the infinity of human souls, which is in itself not only
Christian but orthodox; and this we have lost amid the limitations of a
pessimistic science. Christianity said that any man could be a saint if
he chose; democracy, that any man could be a citizen if he chose. The
note of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man is
stamped with an irrevocable psychology, and is cramped for perpetuity
in the prison of his skull. It was a world that expected everything of
everybody. It was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. And
in England and literature its living expression was Dickens.
We shall consider Dickens in many other capacities, but let us put this
one first. He was the voice in England of this humane intoxication
and expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything. His best
books are a carnival of liberty, and there is more of the real spirit
of the French Revolution in “Nicholas Nickleby” than in “The Tale
of Two Cities.” His work has the great glory of the Revolution, the
bidding of every man to be himself; it has also the revolutionary
deficiency; it seems to think that this mere emancipation is enough.
No man _encouraged_ his characters so much as Dickens. “I am an
affectionate father,” he says, “to every child of my fancy.” He was
not only an affectionate father, he was an everindulgent father. The
children of his fancy are spoilt children. They shake the house like
heavy and shouting schoolboys; they smash the story to pieces like
so much furniture. When we moderns write stories our characters are
better controlled. But, alas! our characters are rather easier to
control. We are in no danger from the gigantic gambols of creatures
like Mantalini and Micawber. We are in no danger of giving our readers
too much Weller or Wegg. We have not got it to give. When we experience
the ungovernable sense of life which goes along with the old Dickens
sense of liberty, we experience the best of the revolution. We are
filled with the first of all democratic doctrines, that all men are
interesting; Dickens tried to make some of his people appear dull
people, but he could not keep them dull. He could not make a monotonous
man. The bores in his books are brighter than the wits in other books.
I have put this position first for a defined reason. It is useless
for us to attempt to imagine Dickens and his life unless we are able
at least to imagine this old atmosphere of a democratic optimism--a
confidence in common men. Dickens depends upon such a comprehension in
a rather unusual manner, a manner worth explanation, or at least remark.
The disadvantage under which Dickens has fallen, both as an artist and
a moralist, is very plain. His misfortune is that neither of the two
last movements in literary criticism has done him any good. He has
suffered alike from his enemies, and from the enemies of his enemies.
The facts to which I refer are familiar. When the world first awoke
from the mere hypnotism of Dickens, from the direct tyranny of his
temperament, there was, of course, a reaction. At the head of it came
the Realists, with their documents, like Miss Flite. They declared
that scenes and types in Dickens were wholly impossible (in which they
were perfectly right), and on this rather paradoxical ground objected
to them as literature. They were not “like life,” and there, they
thought, was an end of the matter. The Realist for a time prevailed.
But Realists did not enjoy their victory (if they enjoyed anything)
very long. A more symbolic school of criticism soon arose. Men saw that
it was necessary to give a much deeper and more delicate meaning to the
expression “like life.” Streets are not life, cities and civilizations
are not life, faces even and voices are not life itself. Life is
within, and no man hath seen it at any time. As for our meals, and our
manners, and our daily dress, these are things exactly like sonnets;
they are random symbols of the soul. One man tries to express himself
in books, another in boots; both probably fail. Our solid houses and
square meals are in the strict sense fiction. They are things made up
to typify our thoughts. The coat a man wears may be wholly fictitious;
the movement of his hands may be quite unlike life.
This much the intelligence of men soon perceived. And by this much
Dickens’s fame should have greatly profited. For Dickens is “like
life” in the truer sense, in the sense that he is akin to the living
principle in us and in the universe; he is like life, at least in this
detail, that he is alive. His art is like life, because, like life,
it cares for nothing outside itself, and goes on its way rejoicing.
Both produce monsters with a kind of carelessness, like enormous
by-products; life producing the rhinoceros, and art Mr. Bunsby. Art
indeed copies life in not copying life, for life copies nothing.
Dickens’s art is like life because, like life, it is irresponsible,
because, like life, it is incredible.
Yet the return of this realization has not greatly profited Dickens,
the return of romance has been almost useless to this great romantic.
He has gained as little from the fall of the Realists as from their
triumph; there has been a revolution, there has been a counter
revolution, there has been no restoration. And the reason of this
brings us back to that atmosphere of popular optimism of which I
spoke. And the shortest way of expressing the more recent neglect of
Dickens is to say that for our time and taste he exaggerates the wrong
thing.
Exaggeration is the definition of Art. That both Dickens and the
moderns understood Art is, in its inmost nature, fantastic. Time
brings queer revenges, and while the Realists were yet living, the
art of Dickens was justified by Aubrey Beardsley. But men like Aubrey
Beardsley were allowed to be fantastic, because the mood which they
overstrained and overstated was a mood which their period understood.
Dickens overstrains and overstates a mood our period does not
understand. The truth he exaggerates is exactly this old Revolution
sense of infinite opportunity and boisterous brotherhood. And we resent
his undue sense of it, because we ourselves have not even a due sense
of it. We feel troubled with too much where we have too little; we wish
he would keep it within bounds. For we are all exact and scientific
on the subjects we do not care about. We all immediately detect
exaggeration in an exposition of Mormonism or a patriotic speech from
Paraguay. We all require sobriety on the subject of the sea serpent.
But the moment we begin to believe a thing ourselves, that moment we
begin easily to overstate it; and the moment our souls become serious,
our words become a little wild. And certain moderns are thus placed
towards exaggeration. They permit any writer to emphasize doubts,
for instance, for doubts are their religion, but they permit no man
to emphasize dogmas. If a man be the mildest Christian, they smell
“cant”; but he can be a raving windmill of pessimism, and they call
it “temperament.” If a moralist paints a wild picture of immorality,
they doubt its truth, they say that devils are not so black as they are
painted. But if a pessimist paints a wild picture of melancholy, they
accept the whole horrible psychology, and they never ask if devils are
as blue as they are painted.
It is evident, in short, why even those who admire exaggeration do
not admire Dickens. He is exaggerating the wrong thing. They know
what it is to feel a sadness so strange and deep that only impossible
characters can express it: they do not know what it is to feel a joy
so vital and violent that only impossible characters can express
that. They know that the soul can be so sad as to dream naturally of
the blue faces of the corpses of Baudelaire: they do not know that
the soul can be so cheerful as to dream naturally of the blue face
of Major Bagstock. They know that there is a point of depression at
which one believes in Tintagiles: they do not know that there is a
point of exhilaration at which one believes in Mr. Wegg. To them the
impossibilities of Dickens seem much more impossible than they really
are, because they are already attuned to the opposite impossibilities
of Maeterlinck. For every mood there is an appropriate impossibility--a
decent and tactful impossibility--fitted to the frame of mind. Every
train of thought may end in an ecstasy, and all roads lead to Elfland.
But few now walk far enough along the street of Dickens to find the
place where the cockney villas grow so comic that they become poetical.
People do not know how far mere good spirits will go. For instance,
we never think (as the old folklore did) of good spirits reaching to
the spiritual world. We see this in the complete absence from modern,
popular supernaturalism of the old popular mirth. We hear plenty
to-day of the wisdom of the spiritual world; but we do not hear, as
our fathers did, of the folly of the spiritual world, of the tricks of
the gods, and the jokes of the patron saints. Our popular tales tell
us of a man who is so wise that he touches the supernatural, like Dr.
Nikola; but they never tell us (like the popular tales of the past) of
a man who was so silly that he touched the supernatural, like Bottom
the Weaver. We do not understand the dark and transcendental sympathy
between fairies and fools. We understand a devout occultism, an evil
occultism, a tragic occultism, but a farcical occultism is beyond us.
Yet a farcical occultism is the very essence of “The Midsummer Night’s
Dream.” It is also the right and credible essence of “The Christmas
Carol.” Whether we understand it depends upon whether we can understand
that exhilaration is not a physical accident, but a mystical fact; that
exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow; that a joke can be so big
that it breaks the roof of the stars. By simply going on being absurd,
a thing can become godlike; there is but one step from the ridiculous
to the sublime.
Dickens was great because he was immoderately possessed with all this;
if we are to understand him at all we must also be moderately possessed
with it. We must understand this old limitless hilarity and human
confidence, at least enough to be able to endure it when it is pushed
a great deal too far. For Dickens did push it too far; he did push the
hilarity to the point of incredible character-drawing; he did push the
human confidence to the point of an unconvincing sentimentalism. You
can trace, if you will, the revolutionary joy till it reaches the
incredible Sapsea epitaph; you can trace the revolutionary hope till it
reaches the repentance of Dombey. There is plenty to carp at in this
man if you are inclined to carp; you may easily find him vulgar if you
cannot see that he is divine; and if you cannot laugh with Dickens,
undoubtedly you can laugh at him.
I believe myself that this braver world of his will certainly return;
for I believe that it is bound up with realities, like morning and
the spring. But for those who beyond remedy regard it as an error,
I put this appeal before any other observations on Dickens. First
let us sympathize, if only for an instant, with the hopes of the
Dickens period, with that cheerful trouble of change. If democracy has
disappointed you, do not think of it as a burst bubble, but at least
as a broken heart, an old love-affair. Do not sneer at the time when
the creed of humanity was on its honeymoon; treat it with the dreadful
reverence that is due to youth. For you, perhaps, a drearier philosophy
has covered and eclipsed the earth. The fierce poet of the Middle Ages
wrote, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” over the gates of the lower
world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates
of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows,
we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must
recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere.
If, then, you are a pessimist, in reading this story, forego for a
little the pleasures of pessimism. Dream for one mad moment that the
grass is green. Unlearn that sinister learning that you think so clear;
deny that deadly knowledge that you think you know. Surrender the very
flower of your culture; give up the very jewel of your pride; abandon
hopelessness, all ye who enter here.